Just out of curiosity... Does the author get the same amount of money if I borrow the item under unlimited, vs buying the item right out?
Becky
Amazon, Buying Vs Borrowing
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Comments
borrowing vs buying
Hi,
In general, no, the amount paid is lower than if the book was purchased... HOWEVER, the amount paid for a borrowed book seems to vary month to month. I attribute this to the amount of the overall fund used to compensate authors for the borrowing of their book or books.
Of interest, to me anyway, is that I might actually sell three to eight copies a month but have seen from three to as many as fifty borrows in the same period. At this point I think I favor the borrows as they are always greater than the sales and they are (usually) producing more income than the sales. It's an interesting trade-off and I had resisted allowing any borrowing for nearly a year. Now that it is allowed, all of the books I might place will have borrowing permitted.
Of equal interest, again to me, the number of people who borrow seems to be concentrated primarily in the US; and every book that has gone out in Germany has been a sale. Some of the data available to an author allows us to watch trends and is quite interesting.
I hope this answers your question. I wouldn't be afraid to borrow a book even if it means the author will receive less (per read) for it because borrowing occurs far more frequently than sales. At least so I've found.
Anesidora
My own personal preference.....
Is to purchase. I am a voracious reader, and developed the habit of re-reading books numerous times if I like them. I originally developed this habit while in high school as several standardized tests required the ability to provide the title and author of one or more books, as well as a listing of the main characters, the setting, the plot, etc.
I found it much easier to provide detailed information for a book that I had read several times.
More than that, I later found that the more times I read a book, the more detail I picked up. This is not only true when reading fiction, but also with reference materials as well. This little trick has served me well for decades.
But of more recent concern to me is the fact that I will quite often get an urge to pull out a book I have had for years and read it. This often sets me on a campaign to read everything I have by that same author, or any books with a similar plot or characters.
For this reason, I much prefer to purchase the book rather than borrow it. I know that the cost can be prohibitive to some, but that is a condition that we must all address individually. Finances are a fact of l I'fe we all must address, and although I do feel that the cost of a hard cover book has gotten out of hand, I also feel that purchasing the book is my way of honoring the author. I have in fact purposely purchased a book after having read it for free, thus giving back to the author who has given me much enjoyment.
I am much the same with videos. The unfortunate side effect of this is that I now have a library of roughly 600 books, nearly 100% of them hard cover, as well as a collection of over 700 blue ray or DVD discs. This understandably has required me to catalogue them in order to prevent me from duplicating purchases - an act which I have sadly been guilty of on more than one ocassion, hence my current use of excel spreadsheets to track all of books, videos, and music. I just this past weekend added my e-books to the list as well. The nice part of this is with a smart phone, the. List is never beyond my fingertips.
Now if I can just figure out how to keep finding room for all of them........
Not to mention dusting them!
Dallas
D. Eden
“Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir.”
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
Amazon royalties
The royalty on a $5 book at 70% is approximately $3.50, if sold in the US to a US customer. The same proportion applies in the UK, EU, Japan, Canada, Australia, India and most other places, except that tax is taken off the top in many of those places, so that a book priced at £4.00 is actually selling at about £3.50 and the royalty is about £2.40.
If sold in the US to a non-US customer, the royalty is $1.75, half as much. Other than Brazil and Mexico, most sales in Central or South America come under this rule. So do most sales in Asia other than Japan and India.
Borrows are available to US customers and just recently in the UK, EU and maybe CA. A borrow earns a share of a monthly pool based on how many sales of Amazon Prime are made or expected. The pool is often increased once or twice before being divided up but the share for a $5 US book usually varies between $1.20 and $1.80. I don't know how the non-US pools are divided or if they share in the same pool as the US.
Some books seem to attract more borrows than sales, but I'm not sure how that works. A borrow seems to net the seller a little less than half what a sale does, but a whole heck of a lot more than no-sale. :)
There are other wrinkles to pricing and royalties at Amazon and I'm still learning them.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Borrower's View
Possibly of interest for someone considering Amazon Prime: We buy a lot of stuff from Amazon which makes the fast "free" shipping worthwhile for us. The Amazon Prime streaming video and music are good features, but we don't use them enough to make them worthwhile on their own. The Prime borrowing feature works fine, but is very limited. You can only borrow one book per calendar month, and if you borrow a book at the end of one month and return it at the beginning of the next month you've used up both month's borrowing quotas. There is a new Kindle Unlimited service that allows unlimited borrowing for about $10.00 per month, but I don't know the details. You'll want to know the rules before signing up (there is a 30 day free trial).
Possibly of interest depending on your local library; my local library offers 21 day ebook lending using the Overdrive service available in multiple formats including Kindle. The Kindle format borrowing is managed by Amazon (from the Amazon site). It works well.
Kindle Unlimited allows a
Kindle Unlimited allows a borrower to have up to ten books checked out at any time, and to return books and borrow others at any time with no waiting periods or monthly limits.
Kris
{I leave a trail of Kudos as I browse the site. Be careful where you step!}
Unlimited
You can borrow 10 books at a time under the unlimited program... Return any that you want at anytime to get more books. No waiting for the first of the month.
Mixed blessings
Borrowing on the kindle is a mixed bless. On whether or not an author makes more or less with a borrow depends on where they price there book. Until recently I was charging only 99 cents for The Dress Punishment. For a sale I got 35 cents but for a borrow I got 1.20-1.50 depending on the payout. So I made more per borrow than I did for sales (I recently restructured my pricing so it no longer applies).
There is some good about the unlimited. One is that readers are willing to take a chance on an unknown author. Let's face it, with direct publishing there was a lot of garbage being put out on the kindle (and I am not talking just TG stories, I'm talk across the board so don't flame me). Not simply poor stories, but people put out pages of pages of blank pages to pad word counts, people publishing pure gibberish (just strings of words that make no sense), and other such scams. That tend to make people not take a chance. The other thing it cuts down on was the consumer scam of the read and return. Amazon has a liberal return policy on e-books. 21 days. People would buy books, read them, return them for a full refund and the author would net zero. I would get like 3 returns per title and now I get maybe 3 a month total.
The downside is that you are locked into using Amazon as your sole platform. Hopefully this changes in the future, but I'm thinking it's going to take a lawsuit to accomplish this.
Katie Leone (Katie-Leone.com)
Writing is what you do when you put pen to paper, being an author is what you do when you bring words to life
Actually
Kindle ebooks can be returned for 7 days not 21. Here is a link to their return policy.
Daniel, author of maid, whore, bimbo, and sissy free TG fiction since 2000
What the world needs is more geniuses with humility; there are so few of us left.- Oscar Levant
Switched
I switched from Kindle unlimited to a Big Closet subscription as it covers a lot my favourite reading. I have not borrowed or shared. I also buy some premium TG and some very large Sci-fi and fantasy books on Kindle. I also have a Patreon account.
Glenda Ericsson